Professor Leif Wenar
Contact details
Email: leif.wenar@kcl.ac.uk
Room: SW2.12
Biography
Leif Wenar holds the Chair of Ethics at King’s College London.
After earning his Bachelor’s degree from Stanford, he went to Harvard to study with John Rawls, and wrote his doctoral thesis on property rights with Robert Nozick and T.M. Scanlon. He has worked in the UK since 1997.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the Princeton Department of Politics; a Visiting Professor and a Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values; a Visiting Professor at the Stanford University Center on Ethics in Society; a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University School of Philosophy; a Fellow of the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at The Murphy Institute of Political Economy, and a Fellow of the Program on Justice and the World Economy at The Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
Research
Leif Wenar works in three main areas:
• International issues, such as the “resource curse” that afflicts natural resource-exporting countries; the accountability of transnational institutions; and inequalities across borders.
• Rights: How this central normative concept of modernity should be understood, and how specific rights should be justified.
• Justice: Most of Wenar’s scholarly writings have focused on the work of John Rawls. He also co-edited the autobiographical volume Hayek on Hayek.
Several published papers on these topics, and links to the Clean Trade project for improving international trade in natural resources, can be found at wenar.info
Selected Publications
• “The Nature of Claim-Rights” Ethics (2013).
• “Clean Trade in Natural Resources” Ethics & International Affairs (2011).
• “Poverty is No Pond: Challenges for the Affluent” in Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy ed. T. Pogge, P. Illingworth and L. Wenar (Oxford, 2011).
• “Property Rights and the Resource Curse” Philosophy & Public Affairs (2008).
• “Are Liberal Peoples Peaceful?” (with Branko Milanovic) Journal of Political Philosophy (2008).
• “John Rawls” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008).
• “Accountability in International Development Aid” Ethics & International Affairs (2006).
• “The Nature of Rights” Philosophy & Public Affairs (2005).
• “Original Acquisition of Private Property” Mind (1998).
• “The Concept of Property and the Takings Clause” Columbia Law Review (1997).
• “Political Liberalism: An Internal Critique” Ethics (1995).
Teaching
MA Global Ethics & Human Values